Fallor Ergo Sum: Pastors and Elders are Ambulance Drivers

I just got finished reading Eugene Peterson's excellent book, Under the Unpredictable Plant: a Study in Vocational Holiness.There is much to consider in this short volume, but two principles struck home especially: 1) pastors, elders, and church leaders are susceptible to the temptation to demand Christ's glory for themselves, trying to be the Messiah instead of pointing people to him, and 2) we must choose our metaphors with great care, because we look through them in order to understand the world.

So I wrote this short story about ten years ago called "An Ambulance Driver, a Weather Girl, and an Ugly Couch." Subconsciously I was probably thinking about Hemingway and his work as an ambulance driver in WWII. The main character of my story was, as you've guessed by now, an ambulance driver, and also a messed up, ADD, single twenty-something who drank too much and struggled with control issues (was the main character a poorly-drawn portrait of my 23-year-old self? Most likely.)

When I say control issues, I mean that he would make a mark on his living room wall for every patient he lost on the way to the ER. He took responsibility for their deaths. He was a weird kind of perfectionist. It was part of his problem. And it became a sort of contest between him and God. He was wrestling, I guess, with his hyper-Calvinism--was he rushing the patient to the God who heals, or the God who wills everything to pass, including death?

Anyway. I never published it, except on a blog, but when I was thinking about metaphors for ministry, this odd metaphor was the first to show back up. Because if the church is a hospital, and God is the healer (let's work with that side for now), what is the pastor or elder, but an ambulance driver?

Think about it. Ambulance drivers may be paramedics, so they have some medical training. They can do a small amount of healing. But they are rushing the patients to the more qualified healer: the doctor. They try to make the patients comfortable, but there is a sense of urgency. And when the doctor arrives, the ambulance driver steps aside.

Now, replace every instance of the words "ambulance driver" in the previous sentence with "pastor," and every instance of the word "doctor" with "Jesus."

The thing I like about this metaphor is that it keeps the emphasis on the right thing, I think. Are ambulance drivers important? Absolutely. But less essential than the doctor.

And what is required to be an ambulance driver? Not much. In fact, anyone with a driver's license can get someone to the doctor.

But who knows? Maybe the ambulance driver knows a quicker way to get there.

3 Comments

I like the ambulance driver metaphor. God as the doctor, on the other hand, not so much.

I think it is just as important to avoid minimizing God's power through faulty personification as it is to avoid overstating the clerical accomplishment of divine work.

Doctors preserve life, but they do not determine it. They diagnose and treat malignancies, but they do not create and recreate through the power of their word.

God's position is not relative to our own. It is fitting that we lessen ourselves. It does not justly follow that our alteration of self-image should necessitate a recalibration of diety.

Clergy may well be more akin to an ambulance driver, or even the guy who knows the number for 9-1-1. God is still only God. We still need to be transformed and renewed, not merely preserved and treated.

Posted by: Holmes | November 08, 2010 at 01:59 PM